Employment 2.0: The Transient Age

I was born in 1948. When I was a kid, everybody had a mom and a dad, and the dad usually worked at a plant.

Some days, friends in school would ask to borrow a dime to buy a snack, and it was often because their dad had been laid off. Then a few months later, the same kid had a new baseball mitt after dad was called back to work. The expectation for dads and kids was that people started a job when they finished school, and there you stayed until retirement, always at age 65.

We are well on our way into an age when the idea of a "permanent job" barely exists. According to economist Alan Blinder, speaking at an IBM leadership conference July 26, 2007, which I attended, today's 20-somethings can expect to change jobs four times before they're 30 and 10 times before they're 40.

The current recession has accelerated job changes. Current official unemployment figures approach 10%, and the unofficial rate, which includes those who have given up looking for work and those forced into part time, is nearly 17%. By most accounts, even as the economy rebounds, jobs will not necessarily follow other upward economic indicators, which will further force people to go where the jobs are.

Evidence of this trend jumps out in another question from the July Zogby Interactive poll of more than 40,000 U.S. adults. We asked if people had changed jobs in the last four years, and 38% said they had.

You would expect that percentage to be higher among younger adults, but our results seem to exceed expectations, with high levels of job relocation found even for those in their 40s.

In an era of rapid change, current generations of Americans have experienced and shaped our culture in very different ways. I like to group U.S. society into generational cohorts based on the changes that made them unique from other age groups. The two youngest, whom I call First Globals, and Nikes, will be forced to adapt to job transience.

First Globals are the generation born since 1979. In this 30 and under group, 66% have changed jobs since 2005. Working your way up the job ladder is part of being young, but for First Globals, this will be a lifelong process.

My belief is that First Globals are prepared and ready to adapt to multiple occupations. They embrace diversity and mobility, and those who will find economic success will live and work among those who share these lifestyles.

Next are the Nikes, the "just do it generation" born between 1965 and 1978. Many were the first latchkey kids who have a more detached and libertarian streak than their elders. For them, there is little attachment to the "good old days." Among Nikes, 44% have switched jobs in the past four years.

Nikes should be able to adapt to job change almost as well as First Globals. First Globals may have been born into the technological revolution, but Nikes have grown with those changes. Their relative detachment should also serve them well as they shift jobs.

However, there are still huge societal ramifications to this new job market. For example, author Richard Florida wrote in the March 2009 issue of The Atlantic that: "Worldwide, people are crowding into a discrete number of mega-regions, systems of multiple cities and their surrounding suburban rings ... Well-educated professionals and creative workers who live together in dense ecosystems, interacting directly, generate ideas and turn them into products and services faster than talented people in other places can."

Those current urban centers of innovation already exist, and will continue to be the epitome of action. Florida predicts that these successful First Globals are not likely to be homeowners, and that the real estate market must respond with the greater availability of attractive rental units.

These trends lead to some very large questions. What will happen to the sense of community and civic involvement, which have already been severely weakened, as people move among urban centers? How many homes will children have by the time they grow up? Is the military child's life the new model for how most children will grow up? How will that impact education? What happens to the residential home industry, especially small-business contractors? I hate to use the word virtual as an adverb, but will relationships and love indeed become only "virtual" when people are rootless? Those are the questions I can recite off the top of my head. Readers will have their own.

No one has all the answers, but we had better at least start thinking about the questions.